Little Dog Laughed (9 page)

Cecil started to ask about this when Max Romano came with a smile, bearing plates that steamed—lamb kidneys for Dave, tournedos of beef for Cecil. Dave was very likely Max’s oldest customer—he’d come to the place first in 1947, ’48. On the west side then, Max had moved it to a site half a block below Hollywood Boulevard, but street crime had scared off customers there, and now he was back on the west side. This place was not quite the same as the old one, but it would come nearer when the stained glass went in. It was being fashioned now in the workshop of some artisan who took his sweet time. Dave looked up at the smiling Max. In the old days he’d had thick curly black hair, well oiled, and teeth that made his grin legendary. Only thin strands of hair remained, carefully combed across his scalp. And gold patches glinted in his teeth. But a more important change showed itself tonight—Max was losing weight. He had always been a fat man, comfortable in his fatness. Tonight his clothes hung loosely on him. It struck Dave abruptly that Max was old—well past seventy. He said with real anxiety:

“How are you, Max? Are you all right?”

Max set the plates down, and gave Dave a gentle smile. “You’re worried, my friend?” He tugged at the spare cloth of his jacket. “You think I’m wasting away, eh? It is a diet—imagine me on a diet.” He chuckled. “It’s high blood pressure, Dave. The doctors say I have to lose seventy-five pounds. I eat a carrot stick, a stalk of celery, a piece of fish”—he made a circle with his fingers, diamond rings winking in the candlelight—“this big. They want me to live forever.” The corners of his mouth turned down. “Do you call that living?”

“I want you to live forever too,” Dave said.

Max touched his shoulder. “Bless you, my friend. I am going to try”—he sighed and wagged his head dolefully—“but it is torture.” He looked for a moment at their plates and turned sharply away. “Enjoy your dinner,” he said weakly, and hurried off to meet a quartet of customers pushing in at the door, laughing and chattering. Dave looked after him.

“He’s all right,” Cecil said to Dave. “He’s fine.”

“I hope so.” Dave wondered where the gloom came from, and leaned for the champagne bottle again, and filled their glasses. Cecil smiled at him as he did so, and Dave mustered a smile in return. That was better. Cecil was the present. And the future. They were all that mattered. He said, “There are also the Gernsbachs. Why did they run away? Where did they go? What did they see that scared them?”

“A man in a preacher’s collar,” Cecil said, “shooting their neighbor in the head. Sounds scary enough to me.”

“I have to find them.” Dave picked up his fork. “You want to help me? Are you free tonight?”

“Aw, you broke the magic spell.” Cecil pushed back a shirt cuff. On his bony wrist was a large black watch, spiny with stops. He read it, and his eyes opened wide. “I am due back in the newsroom in exactly twenty-eight minutes.” He looked panicked, stuffed his mouth, burned himself, hastily gulped champagne. “Shit. What happened to all the time?”

“I keep asking myself that,” Dave said.

The night guard in the cedar and glass gate-house was a stout, gray-haired woman. She looked soldierly, with the square jutting jaw of a drill sergeant. But the magazine open on the little shelf beside her was
Woman’s Day
, and a straw carryall in a corner behind her showed knitting needles and skeins of yarn in rose and lavender. Dave braked the Jaguar, rolled down the window, said to her:

“Dan’l Chapman, please. My name is Brandstetter.”

She studied him with gray, grandmotherly eyes. Sternly. Was she going to ask whether he had washed behind his ears? “Are you expected?” she said.

“He won’t be surprised,” Dave said.

She took down the phone. “I will,” she said, and told the phone, “Dan’l—there’s a Mr. Braniff or something here.” Dave sighed, opened the car door, got out. “Says he wants to see you.” Dave slid the folder out of his inside jacket pocket, let it fall open, held it through the gate-house door for her to read. She squinted, pushed her head out, nearsighted. “Private investigator,” she said. “I think you should come down to the gate, please.” She hung the phone back on its wall bracket. “He’ll be here in a minute.”

“You take your responsibilities seriously,” Dave said.

“I’m paid to do that.” Half-moon reading glasses lay on the shelf. She put them on, blinked at the magazine for a moment, looked at Dave over the glasses. “He’s a juvenile, and he’s at home alone.”

“I see.” Dave put his folder away. “Did Mike Underhill come to see Adam Streeter the night he was killed?”

“Police already asked me that,” she said. “Answer’s no.”

“Did they ask you if you saw him leave about three
A
.
M
.?”

“No”—she flipped a page of the magazine and bent her head over it again—“but the answer to that is no, too.”

Dave gazed through the wire mesh of the gates at the soft ground lighting among the big azaleas lining the clean-swept blacktop of the drive. “I sometimes have to stay up all night in my line of work. It isn’t easy not to fall asleep.” He turned back to her. “Do you ever fall asleep?”

“When you have to stay up every night”—she still mused over the magazine, color photos of sandwiches frilly with lettuce—“keeping awake gets to be a habit. Nothing to it after a while.”

“Then you saw Harry Gernsbach leave,” Dave said, “about three thirty, four?”

She took off the glasses and stared at him. “I did not. Why would he do that? He keeps regular hours. Very regular. Set your watch by Harry Gernsbach leaving and coming home.”

“What about a clergyman, a priest?” Dave said. “Name of Pierce Glendenning. Did he come that night? To see Adam Streeter, I mean?”

“Police didn’t ask me that, either,” she said. “But you need batting practice.” She almost smiled. “You just struck out.” She turned her head. “Here comes Dan’l.”

The air pushing in off the dark water was chilly, and the boy came in a sweater, a windbreaker, hands thrust into the pockets of corduroy pants. These made him look less scrawny than had the trunks and cutoff shirt of yesterday, less of a child. The wind ruffled his red hair. He pushed it out of his eyes and squinted through the gates at Dave.

“Dan’l,” the guard said, “do you know this man?”

“You got his name wrong,” Dan’l said. “It’s Brandstetter. Dave. Yes, I know him, Clara. It’s okay, honest.” His smile at the woman in her square starchy tan uniform, gun on her hip, was fleeting. His eyes were worried. He asked Dave, “Is it about Chrissie? Is something wrong?”

“Nothing we don’t both know about.” Dave got behind the wheel of the Jaguar again. But the gates didn’t open. He looked at Clara, who looked at Dan’l, her mouth a thin line.

“I wish your parents were home,” she said.

“Come on, Clara.” Dan’l clutched the wire mesh like a kitten in a pound. “I’m not six years old anymore.”

“Six, sixteen,” she snorted, “what’s the difference?”

But she opened the gates.

Dave parked the Jaguar in shadow inside the grounds and far from the gates. Dan’l started to get out. Dave said, “Just a second. I have some questions, first. The Gernsbachs’ boat—is it moored near here?”

“Sure,” Dan’l said. “Only not now. It’s not there, now.”

“I didn’t think so. Okay—did you ever hear Adam or Chrissie mention Rue Glendenning’s father? A priest?”

“Glendenning? The kid from UCLA who came to ask Adam how to be a foreign correspondent?” Dan’l’s face was no more than a pale shadow, but Dave saw puzzlement in it. “No. Where does his father figure?”

“You made a play on words,” Dave said.

“Ho-ho,” Dan’l said. “They never mentioned him to me.

“Right—question three.” Dave opened his door and got out. Dan’l got out on the other side. “Close it quietly.” Some windows were alight in the condominiums, second-and third-floor windows. Dan’l clicked his door shut. Dave did the same, and went to the boy. He said softly, “If I gave you ropes and so on, could you climb to the roofs up there, cross them, and drop down onto the balcony of Streeter’s workroom?”

“Who needs ropes?” Leaf-mottled ground light played on Dan’l’s eager face. “It should be easy. Come on.” He moved off, soundless in Nikes. “I’ll show you.”

Dave followed him in and out of shadow, past the silent fronts of the jogged buildings. As they moved on, the air grew cooler. The fence held access gates, locked—tenants who owned boats would have keys. The boats rocked asleep at their moorings beyond the fence, under stretched blue canvas coverings, water lapping softly at their sleek white hulls, masts tilting at the sky like pointers in the hands of so many teachers at one vast blackboard.

They reached the far end of the buildings. Trash modules, blue metal with sloping lids, stood here against garage walls. Dan’l swung up on one of these, stood, grabbed rafter ends, hiked himself to a garage roof, scrambled to his feet, and stood grinning down at Dave. “See?” Dave saw. Beyond the boy lay another easy pull-up to a second-story roof. From there, one more light-bodied lift would put him on the highest roofs. “Good,” Dave said. “Go quietly, right? I’ll meet you there.”

Even in darkness, the lock on number twenty-seven was easy to pick. He closed the door softly behind him. Light came through the French doors into the big drowsing Chinese room from the pool patio. He walked quickly to the spiral staircase, where he slipped off his shoes. Even in stocking feet, his steps brought soft resonance from the dark metal. At the top, he put the shoes on. A light switch was on the wall just inside the workroom door. He lifted it with the edge of a hand. The desk lamp flickered on. He pressed the switch that controlled the drapes, and they swished back. He unlocked and opened the French doors. The flowerpots still lay there, the earth that had spilled from them dry now, the stalks and leaves of the plants withered.

He sat at the desk, facing the keyboard of the computer, the computer’s empty gray face. Frowning, he let his gaze rove—and there lay the thick black book. He remembered Chrissie standing here, her thumb nervously rubbing the corners of its pages. He pulled the book to him and opened it at the last of those scraps of paper Streeter had laid in it to mark references he wanted to get back to and never would. He had highlighted a name in yellow with a broad marking pen—
Lothrop Zorn
,
Colonel
,
U
.
S
.
Marine Corps
,
retired
. Dave heard a soft sound behind him, half turned, and something cold poked his left temple. Not a gun barrel—a finger.

“Bang, you’re dead,” Dan’l Chapman said.

“As easy as that,” Dave said. He looked down the room at the balcony. “Any trouble with the flowerpots?”

“Not me.” Dan’l, panting a little, but pleased with himself, perched on the Turkish inlaid cabinet. “I didn’t knock those over.” He laughed. “Pretty neat, right? I always wanted to do that. What I needed was authorization, right? Being a kid is a hard thing to get over, having to ask permission.”

“You’ll manage,” Dave said. “Could Underhill have done it?”

Dan’l blinked, scratched his acne, frowned. “Could he? I don’t know. He wasn’t fat or old or anything. I guess so, probably. You think he killed Adam?”

“The police think so. For that hundred thousand Streeter got from the TV producer.”

“Jesus,” Dan’l whispered to himself. “What a shit.”

“How could he get past Clara without her seeing him?”

“He couldn’t. But there’s a cut in the fence. I noticed it two or three days ago. Along the back there, farther than where we went. It’s cut and bent back. Was. My dad reported it when I showed it to him. They’ve mended it now.”

“Meaning he could have come in from the water, arrived in a boat, cut the fence, and then climbed here as you did.” Dave closed the book, stood up. “Shut the windows and the curtains, all right? We’d better get out of here.” He picked up the book, thinking of how fast Glendenning ran up that long flight of stairs. It could have been simple fright that drove him. Or he could have been in excellent shape. Everybody jogged these days, everybody played tennis or racquet ball. Even preachers, he supposed. Why not? Dan’l came back down the room and raised his eyebrows at the book.

“You taking that?” he said.

“I’ll return it.” Dave moved toward the door with Dan’l following. “There may be a lead in it. Streeter was using it in his work.” Dave switched off the workroom light. They moved along the shadowy gallery toward the stairs.

Dan’l said, “Why don’t you think Underhill did it?”

“Because someone went to a lot of trouble to frame him.” Dave stood on one foot, then the other, to slip off his shoes. Book and shoes held in one hand, he took hold of the cold steel stair rail and started down. “Men in camouflage combat outfits—ever seen any of them hanging around this neighborhood?”

“You’re kidding,” Dan’l said. “You mean shooting a film, or something like that?”

“I don’t know what I mean,” Dave said. “I wish I did.”

N
AKED BESIDE DAVE IN
the wide dark bed on the sleeping loft of the rear building, Cecil sighed and stirred long arms and legs. Dave opened his eyes. Stars showed through the skylight overhead. He peered at the red numbers of the bedside clock. Four ten. Cecil had turned his back. Dave shifted position to lie against his back and to drape an arm gently over his lanky form. Cecil murmured, laughed softly, and moved Dave’s hand downward. Then he gave a sudden jerk, and sat up. Teeth and eye whites showed in the darkness. “Somebody’s out in the courtyard. Listen.” Footsteps crackled the dry leaves fallen from the old oak out there onto the bricks. Dave rolled aside, sat up, swung his feet to the floor, and reached for his clothes. That the bed moved told him Cecil was doing the same on his side. And more quickly. His tall, lean shape was at the chest of drawers, rattling it open, hands rummaging among clothes. He came up with Dave’s Sig Sauer automatic, a tool he hated and feared. Its metal glinted in the starlight. He started toward the stairs.

“Stay here with that,” Dave told him, “and cover me.”

He zipped up his jeans, tucked in a T-shirt. Barefoot, he passed Cecil and went down the plank stairs, cool to his soles, thumping under his heels. He wasn’t awake yet. In his dream, those night commandos of Hunsinger’s had moored a motor gig in the black waters behind the condominiums and clambered out. Bright blades had clipped the hurricane fencing, strong hands in black gloves had parted the cut place. The men had ducked under it, guns in their hands, and like skinny young Dan’l earlier this night, begun to clamber up the buildings ghostly in their ground lights. The dream had left a cold place in his belly. His heart thudded as he reached the foot of the stairs and began to move toward the front door. Why didn’t he turn on lamps? No one had threatened him. He didn’t turn on lamps. He wished there were a window in the wall with the door. He wished the door were not solid. His hand moved to turn the deadbolt, unhitch the chain, but he didn’t do these things. He stood motionless and strained to hear. The footsteps crunching leaves drew nearer. A hand fumbled the heavy black iron knocker. It banged. The sound ricocheted down the long wooden room.